I've just got approval to analyse the words of LC's songs for my English Language MA dissertation. This is so exciting!! And we have tickets for the Manchester concert! http://studentat60.blogspot.co.uk/

26,038 words. That's how long the combined lyrics of the studio albums are. I had to edit the lyrics to include all the repeated sections, as mostly they were shown as '...' but now I have a version with them there, in full, for analysis. The interesting analysis start here.

Thanks for the warning. I know that for a lot of people these songs are very personal and have special meaning. The aspect I will be looking at is the portrayal of the first person narrator. When he says 'I' or 'We', who is he describing? These are mini works of fiction and the 'speaker' is not L. Cohen. For example, sometimes its a lover, sometimes it's a leader and sometimes it's a victim, being moved down the track. How many of these narrators are there? That's the kind of thing I will be looking at. It will be a bit scientific - I will be counting words and working out percentages (with the help of software). So only the final interpretation will be mine. A lot of it will be presentation of measured linguistic features.

You are of course absolutely right that the narrator is a character and not necessarily the author's voice, something most commercial writers seem to have forgotten these days. For example, 'the lying narrator' is a fascinating subject all on its own. But that is more in the realm of Literary Criticism than Linguistics of course.

Perhaps the most confusing narration is in Famous Blue Raincoat. The consensus seems to be that the narrator of one age is talking to himself at another age.

“If you do have love it's a kind of wound, and if you don't have it it's worse.” - Leonard, July 1988

I haven't posted for a while because I have been working really hard at analysing the lyrics. I keep looking for patterns - in his use of nouns, verbs and words like 'and' and 'the. He uses those two words far more than do other popular songs I have compared him with, so they are significant. For weeks, I have not found patterns and have been tearing my hair out. At last, I am beginning to get it. There is more than one pattern, and they are all interleaved. He is like conversation and writing and poetry and complex literature. All at once. So he is intimate and organised and confusing and challenging. And I have evidence.

The other pattern, which has been staring me in the face for ages is that its not what he says, its the way that he says it. There is no significant difference in the content words he uses (like 'pillow' or 'violin'). The difference between him and other popular songs is in the way the language is structured. He uses 'the' a lot, which is typical of formal prose. But then he uses 'and' a lot, like conversation, to string a lot of things together.